DOJ Urges Supremes Not To Hear Network DVR Case - Which could prove to be a big win for Cablevision, TV lovers...

In a filing, (pdf) Streamyx DOJ Solicitor General on Friday urged the Supreme Court not to hear a case Multimedia Promotion which the entertainment industry has sued Cablevision for use of a network DVR (or RS-DVR). The network DVR stores video content at the network head end, eliminating the need for a consumer-side set top box entirely. Cablevision tested the idea in 2006 storing 80GB of data for 1,000 trial users on their network. But the company was sued by the entertainment industry, who feared a loss of ad revenue and content control.

The entertainment industry Email To Sms NBC, CBS, Walt Disney, ABC; and others) saw legal success early on, but Cablevision won a key ruling from a federal appeals court in Philadelphia last summer. The case now heads to the Supreme Court, and a refusal to hear the case would in essence be a victory for Cablevision, who has previously stated their implementation of the service would provide customers with about 160GB of network-side storage for about the same price Wireless Broadband Internet current DVR service (around $10 per month).

Traditionally the Supreme Court doesn't always listen to the DOJ's Solicitor General, though they have been swayed by input in the past. Consumer advocates were please by the news, Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn "wholeheartedly agreeing" with the DOJ. "Common sense would dictate that a recording is a recording, whether made on a set-top box or in a cable head-end," says Sohn "We hope the U.S. Supreme Court follows this advice and removes any legal obstacles from the Cablevision service going forward."

Should the Supreme Court hear the case and side with the entertainment industry, network functionality could be significantly less interesting for consumers, as any compromises with copyright holders could result in annoying changes such as unskippable advertisements.
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Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilisations dating from as far back as 4,000 BC. The Iranian Medes unified Iran into a kingdom in 625 BC. They were succeeded by three Iranian empires, the Achaemenids, Parthians and Sassanids which governed Iran for over a thousand years. This was followed by a period of foreign occupation and short lived native dynasties that lasted for centuries. However, it was once again re-unified as an independent state in 1501 by the Safavid dynasty. The Safavid dynasty promoted Twelver Shi'a Islam as the official religion, this was a monumental turning point in the history of Islam. Iran was a monarchy ruled by a Shah almost without interruption from 1501 until the 1979 when Iran officially became an Islamic republic on 1 April 1979. Iran suffered several wars with Imperial Russia during the Qajar Network Maintenance resulting in Iran losing over half its territories to Russia and Britain. However, in spite of the Great Game, Iran managed to remain sovereign and was never colonised.

In 1925, Reza Khan overthrew the Qajar dynasty and became Shah, he introduced progressive policies of industrialisation, railroad construction and the establishment of a national education system. He sought to balance Russian and British influence in Iran, but during World War Two, alarmed at Iran's growing ties with Germany, both Russia and Britain invaded, forcing the Shah to abdicate in favour of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1951, Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister, he became popular after he nationalised Iran's oil reserves. In response, Britain placed an embargo on Iranian oil and collaborated with the United States to depose Mossadegh. The operation was successful, Mossadegh was arrested and the Shah's rule became increasingly autocratic. With American support, the Shah was able to rapidly modernise the Iranian infrastructure but he crushed all forms of political opposition.

The Iranian Revolution, also known as the Islamic Revolution began in January 1978 with public demonstrations against the Shah resulting in his fleeing the country in January 1979. In December 1979, a theocratic constitution was approved by the country whereby the Ayatollah Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein decided to take advantage of the disorder that he perceived in Iran following the takeover coupled with the negative attitudes that Western governments now viewed Iran with. On 22 September 1980, the Iraqi army invaded at Khuzetan, thus starting the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq initially steam-rolled the Iranian forces but by 1982, Iran turned the tide and managed to force the Iraqis back into Iraq. The war dragged on until 1988, when a truce was accepted that was mediated by the UN.

Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.net

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One of my fondest video game memories is the Activision classic Kaboom! for the Atari 2600. Back in the days when the simple appeal of repetitive, score driven gaming could hold your interest for hours on end this was the top shelf for a pre-teen like myself.

Current younger gamers may have some exposure to the game either through various Activision collections on current or recent gen consoles or through Atari 2600 emulators but there is a major difference between these versions and the original. That Tm Streamyx be the controls.

Back in the Atari 2600 days there were various controllers for the system and each game required that you use the proper ones. The vast majority used either the tried and true joystick controller or the Atari Paddle controllers. With today's generation of consoles there's no acceptable approximation for the paddle controller. A simple Streamyx with a round spinning wheel that gave you "stop-on-a-dime" precision for games that required them. The nearest you could get to the experience today would be an arcade trackball. Kaboom! was the ultimate paddle controller game. It was the one that wore them out.

It was a simple concept. There was a villain on top of a wall dropping bombs and you were a stack of water buckets at the bottom of the wall. You had to catch the bombs as they were dropped. If you missed one: KABOOM! You started with three buckets stacked and every time you missed a bomb you would lose a bucket. When you missed three total the game was over.

My older brother and I would literally spend hours on this game every night. The instruction manual (a rather hefty one for Streamyx Self Installation a simple game) spoke of a special event that we were obsessed with unlocking.

If you were able to reach the incredible score of 10,000 points the villain, in his acknowledgement of your incredible achievement, would honor you with some mysterious gesture.

My brother and I pounded this game for a long time to get there. Back then, there was no internet, so you couldn't buy the game, run home and hop on line to find out every piece of information you needed or wanted about it. Your gaming "community" was the other kids in your fifth grade class who also had an Atari or who became your sworn enemy because they had the Intellivision console. My older brother was in his 20s, so his gaming community back then was his old high school buddies he still got high with.

Kaboom! gameplay became an art form. There were eight levels. With each advancing level the villain would sweep back and forth across the wall stripping the bombs with greater speed.

Like any repetition-based game you could boil down the first 5 or 6 levels to an art form only missing when you became too complacent. Levels 7 and 8 were the wild cards. To get to 10,000 you would have to cycle through all 8 levels and continue at the crazy-paced level 8 over and over again until you lost. The last two levels were so fast and chaotic that it was nearly impossible to nail down a pattern that gave you a continued 90 plus percent success rate.

There were lots of tricks. Every thousand points, you would get an extra bucket if you were down to less than three. Every time you missed a bomb, the game would revert back and start you at the speed of the Tm Streamyx Broadband level. The perfect strategy if you had all three buckets was to deliberately miss the last bomb that would put you over the next 1000 point bonus so you could go back and rack up all the points you could by repeating the previous level knowing that you'd pick that third bucket back up with the first bomb catch of the next wave at a slower speed.

On the odd numbered levels, the villain would strip the bombs close together back and forth across the wall in a pretty simple pattern. On the even levels, he would spread the bomb drops farther apart and throw in an occasional erratic move at the right side of the wall.

The paddle controllers, while precise, also did show a little drag. One of the controllers was just a little better than the other and my brother and I would always have to call dibbs on the "good" one. One of them had a little bit of a jerkier motion while moving your buckets across the screen. In certain spots you could take your fingers off and the buckets would twitch. Sometimes you would hit that spot at a bad moment and even though the effect was minimal it could cause your buckets to twitch away from where you needed to be causing you to miss.

All of these factors were part of our intense study of the game. And for a short period of time it was big part of our night-life. I don't know how many hours, days, weeks, months my brother and I put into the game, but we began to take on a rather defeatist attitude about it after a while with talk like "it's impossible. The 10,000 point barrier can't be reached."

We had spent so much time speculating on what the hell the mystical 10,000 point reward could be that we had built it up to being just about anything up to and including the game cartridge jumping out of the console and giving you hand job on the spot. The smart money was on my brother's speculation that the villain would "tip his hat" to you. Hey, with Atari 2600 graphics a hat tip was a pretty reasonable expectation!

It all came to a head one night. I was pounding through level 8 over and over again approaching 10,000. Finally, I was down to my last water bucket. Almost there! Almost. And then, at 9,998 points, I missed the next bomb. Game Over.

That was the bubble burster and we both pretty much lost our taste for the game. We had both had enough.

We played Atari after that, but Kaboom! was just an occasional joke and we moved on with our gaming lives. This would have been about around 1983.

The story picks up about 12 years later in the mid 1990s. My brother was married and had two kids by this time. I was married but didn't have either of my sons yet. I was unpacking some old junk in my modest apartment and came across my old Atari 2600. It still worked fine, but the TV/GAME converter box didn't work, so I literally took the metal end of the cord that went into the switch box and duct taped it to the metal TV antenna and tuned the TV to channel 3. Don't laugh folks, that worked like a charm back in the channel 3 days of non-cable ready TVs. Crystal clear pic as long as you didn't bump it.

Anyway. Older. Married. College Degree. Full Time Job. It was time revisit Kaboom!

All the time spent on it when I was younger. Man, no way I was going to whip my skills back into shape, but it was worth a shot.

It took about 90 minutes. I don't know what changed all those years later. Night after night. Week after week. Neither me nor my brother could break that 10,000 barrier. Then, without touching it for a dozen years, I played for 90 minutes and hit it.

Now before I Tm Streamyx Package this story, let me say that if you play this game in one of these collections it's just not the same with a keyboard, XBOX controller or on a Gameboy. It's JUST NOT THE SAME without the paddle controllers.

In any case, at 10,000 points the villain smiles briefly. Normally, he had a simple "V" on his face that was his mouth frowning. At 10,000, the "V" frown turns upside down into a smile.

What a crock of shit.

Mike "ScuzzBuster" Broda is a film critic and editorial writer for Deviant Knowledge, an entertainment/leisure blog.

Please visit http://www.deviantknowledge.com for more gaming, movie, and reviews, opinion and fun.